Friday, October 28, 2016

The
Great Train Robbery is often regarded as the first
Western movie. It wasn’t, of course. Cowboys had been captured on celluloid
before and short Western scenes were quite common. As early as 1894 Buffalo Bill Cody’s troupe had been filmed and there had been a motion picture Lasso Thrower. These were viewed by a
single person in a kind of what-the-butler-saw device. In 1896 motion pictures
were first commercially projected onto large screens in the US. In 1898 there
was Cripple Creek Bar-Room Scene and
the following year Poker at Dawson City.
Earlier in the same year as The Great
Train Robbery, Biograph released A
Bucking Broncho, with the camera panning with the movement of the horse,
and when the bronc backs up suddenly, the audience must have thought it would
end up in their laps. A more ambitious attempt than these vignettes came when in
the summer of ’03 Biograph produced the 21-minute Kit Carson, eleven fictional scenes of the life of the great
pioneer, including a violent scalping. Western thrills had come to the masses.

Cripple Creek, 1898

So no, The Great Train Robbery was not the first Western movie. But when
it was released at the end of the year the Western movie as we know it was
effectively born. Suddenly we have a dramatically creative story film constructing
an illusion of reality – the magic at the heart of the whole motion picture
industry. It told a story visually. And it established the
crime-pursuit-showdown element that was to become standard to the Western.
There was gunplay and galloping. There was even the comic scene of cowboys
shooting at the feet of a tenderfoot in a saloon to make him dance.

That tenderfoot was Maxwell Henry
Aronson (left), soon to become Gilbert M Anderson and even more famous as Broncho
Billy. He also played a bandit and the train passenger who is shot. It was his
first Western of over 300 in a career that was to last till an entertaining
performance at the age of 85 in The Bounty Killer. In 1904 he was in another Edison/Edwin S Porter film, Western Stage Coach Hold Up. Four years after The
Great Train Robbery he founded the film company Essanay with George Spoor
(the name comes from their initials, S&A) and in hundreds of shorts he
became in effect the first cowboy film star. He went on to write, direct and produce Westerns too. He was presented with an honorary
Oscar in 1957 and died in 1971 at the age of ninety.

It is easy for us sophisticated
movie-goers to mock the short picture and think it crude - it seems prehistoric. The substitution of a dummy for the
trainman then thrown from the train, for example, is laughably bad to us now,
and the flimsy stage set of the station seems to come from some amateur
theatrical production. But we should
remember that many who saw it had never seen a motion picture at all. It must
have been amazing suddenly to be transported into an imaginary world which seemed
so real. The final (inspired) scene of
Justus D Barnes (right) firing his pistol into the camera – and thus, it appeared,
directly at the audience – was said to have caused people to faint.

And of course there was no cinema as an art form. It was a technical advance. Thomas Edison (left), who was a difficult man to get on with, was no artist and even distrusted those who were. No one (yet) had pretensions of creating a beautiful or 'literary' motion picture. They were too busy photographing a scene as realistically as they could (which to our modern eyes isn't very, but it was then startling).

Another point worth recalling is that
the Wild West was so recent then. Wild West shows were at the height of their
popularity (in fact the new movie Westerns would contribute to their rapid decline).
Horses and guns and Western clothes were common. In March 1903, six months
before The Great Train Robbery came
out, Kid Curry of The Wild Bunch died in the attempt to rob a train. Imagine!
That’s like a film of some daring robbery early in 2016 to us now! Westerns weren’t
history; they were current events.

The
Great Train Robbery was a commercial success on a
scale never before seen. It was this as much as any artistic innovations that
made it the progenitor of the great genre. Edison and his competitors exploited
it for all it was worth, rapidly producing a whole series of ‘Westerns’ such as
The Great Bank Robbery, The Bold Bank
Robbery, The Hold-Up of the Rocky Mountain Express, and so on. There was
even Edison’s The Little Bank Robbery
(1906) in which children took the parts and the bandits steal toys and candy. In
1904 the Lubin company made a scene-by-scene copy of The Great Train Robbery and released it with the same title –
copyright laws were much laxer then. It reminds me of the spaghetti western
boom of the 1960s: a couple of commercially successful movies were followed by
a whole glut of knock-off imitations until there seemed to be nothing in
Italian movie theaters but Westerns. By 1908 the genre was so well established that
distributors’ catalogues listed releases under Drama, Comic and Western.

But just as the spaghettis soon
exhausted themselves and already by the early 70s the audiences thought there
could be too much of a good thing, so too by 1914 reviewers were complaining
that Westerns were tiresome clichés, old hat, a thing of the past. The critics
were wrong, of course. Cecil B DeMille directed the first movie version of The Virginian in that year. William S Hart was just getting into his stride. Tom Mix was ridin’ the range. Shorts were becoming feature films. People
packed the nickelodeons to see them. The celluloid West was only just
beginning.

The bandits escape with their swag

The movie industry itself moved West. The Great Train Robbery and its
imitators had been filmed in New Jersey. But soon Tulsa, San Antonio, Prescott,
Las Vegas NM, and then Los Angeles became the centers of the industry, and
Westerns as subject matter seemed even more natural and logical.

And just as real Western lawmen and
outlaws had cashed in on their former glories by appearing in Wild West shows,
now they ‘advised’ on or even appeared in Western movies. Wyatt Earp wanted
Hart to make a film of his life. Al Jennings starred in four Westerns between
1914 and 1920.

In 1899 Edwin
Stanton Porter (left) joined the Edison Manufacturing Company. He rapidly took charge
of motion picture production at Edison's New York studios, operating the
camera, directing the actors, and assembling the final print. During the next
decade Porter became the most influential film maker in the United States. He
was an innovator. For instance, he seems to have invented the dissolve: instead
of using abrupt splices or cuts between shots Porter had gradual transitions
from one image to another, helping audiences follow complex movement. He has never, though, been thought of as a founding father of film in the way Griffith or Ince are.

Though
uncredited, Porter directed and wrote The
Great Train Robbery and with Blair Smith did much of the cinematography and
editing (still in its infancy) too. It was a very personal creation. Taking a
story so well-known from dime novels and stage melodramas (such as Scott Marble’s
The Great Train Robbery of 1896) was
an inspired move.

The one-reel
film, with a runtime of only twelve minutes, was put together in twenty
separate shots. It was so well done that intertitle cards were not needed. The
film cuts freely from interiors to exteriors and there is a narrative flow. It
was one of the earliest to use the technique of cross cutting, in which two
scenes are shown to be occurring simultaneously but in different locations. The
camera placed on the rear of the tender, the long and smoothly executed panning
shot as the bandits escape into the woods, these were a revelation in 1903. It’s
still a fun watch even today. Then, it was a sensation. It lasted for years,
being shown all over the country.

Although the original negatives of the
film are long gone, there are modern prints of good quality and the film is
entirely watchable today. There are several versions on YouTube or you can get
a DVD, and it's definitely worth the effort.

Wednesday, October 26, 2016

In 1939 the big studios
decided that Westerns weren’t just juvenile programmers; they could be big
box-office A-pictures for adults too. Stagecoach
came out that year with United Artists, as did Fox’s Jesse James, Universal’s Destry Rides Again and Warner Brothers’ Dodge City. And they were big hits. But that didn’t mean that the sixty-minute B-Western disappeared, far from it. It was
alive and well in countless movie theaters in the US and throughout the big
wide world.

The singing cowboy was a
staple of such fare and of course we think first of Gene Autry, Roy Rogers and
Tex Ritter but there many others. Fred Scott, for example.

Fred Leedon Scott (1902 –
1991) was a genuine singer if not a genuine cowboy. He had been resident
baritone at the San Francisco Opera. But he got into movies with a small part
in a Harry Carey oater and from 1936 to ’42 led in fourteen Westerns of his
own (sometimes produced by Stan Laurel) for the Poverty Row outfit Spectrum Pictures. Known as The
Silvery-Voiced Buckaroo, he galloped over the plains on his horse White King,
pausing occasionally to sing a song, romance a girl (chastely, of course) or
thwart a villain. Seen now, he was, frankly, a very wooden actor and his pictures were rather clunky, but the undemanding and probably juvenile audiences didn't seem to mind. He did
have a certain charm and you could do worse than watch a Fred Scott oater. He retired from movies to go into business. He said, “I
don't ride anymore. I have a deal with horses - I don't get on them and they
don't sell real estate.”

In
Old Montana starts with a sonorous and rather long on-screen
text:

When the links in the chain of States that made up
the great United States were forged, there were many conflicts, dramatic and
spectacular, that often threatened the prosperity of the frontier and the
economic structure of the whole nation. Such was the war that broke out in
Montana in 1860 between the cattle barons and the sheepherders. The cattlemen
had priority and also claimed sheep polluted the land and streams, cropping the
grass so short the grazing land was ruined for years. The sheepmen claimed that
raising sheep was more profitable and that "the spread" was Government
land and they had as much right to it as anyone else. The series of events
chronicles here took place in the Lobo Valley just below the fertile grazing
lands of the Powder River Basin. Although frankly a Western story, with
fictitious characters, each one originally had its counterpart in fact.

Yup, it’s a
cattlemen vs. sheepherders plot. We are in the Powder River country, 1880 –
though there’s little specifically Montana about the story, which could have
been set anywhere in the generic ‘West’. But the Montana setting gave Fred a
chance to sing the title song.

Fred is an
Army officer sent in plain clothes (well, not very plain; rather dudish duds if
the truth be told) to put a stop to the sheepmen v. cattlemen feud. He is
accompanied by comic old-timer sidekick Harry Harvey (it was often Al St. John
in his movies but this time it’s Harry). Of course they sing a song on the way
there and Harry is the hilariously worst mimer ever seen: his lips don’t even
remotely match the words of the ditty. Considering he had the second-biggest
part it was rather mean of them only to bill him eighth. Harry was a vaudeville
player who went into movies in the early 30s and took character parts for over
forty years. Later he was a regular on the The
Roy Rogers Show as Sheriff Blodgett. You can often spot him in Westerns,
from being a stage passenger in the 1932 Tom Mix version of Destry Rides Again to a small part as
Drew on a 1974 episode of Hec Ramsey,
with, incredibly, almost 350 Western appearances between the two. In In Old Montana he does the old-timer act
though in fact he was only in his thirties.

The picture
has all the features we have come to expect and which, doubtless, the
Western-loving audience (mostly of boys) would happily forgive. Cheap sets, lots
of action (actually rather too many horse chases; they become monotonous), ‘comic’
interludes, intercut stock footage from earlier movies to save money, and so
on. There’s a stereotype “squaw” (Jane Keckley) who can be made fun of. There
are many songs in which Fred’s fingers in no way match the strumming that is
heard and somehow an invisible violinist has got into the girl’s kitchen to accompany him.
You spot who the villain (Frank LaRue) is instantly. The hero is unjustly
imprisoned and breaks out with the aid of his sidekick.

Never mind, it’s
all harmless fun. Right triumphs over might, the sheepmen and cattlemen kiss
and make up, Fred gets the girl (Jean Carmen) and the bad guys are carted off
to jail by the sheriff. I enjoyed it. I know I’m easy to please as far as
Westerns go but still, I enjoyed it.

Monday, October 24, 2016

Dakota
Lil is another 50s Western with a B-movie line-up,
George Montgomery, Rod Cameron and Marie Windsor. But actually it turns out to
be rather better than hoped.

For one thing it’s about Tom Horn (left). OK,
yes, a very fictionalized Tom Horn, and also a rather unconvincing one in the
shape of Montgomery, but still. Between his time in Arizona and the Johnson
County War Horn did in fact work as a Pinkerton detective in Colorado and
Wyoming, including tracking train robbers. During the Wilcox Train Robbery investigation,
Horn learned that Sheriff Josiah Hazen, killed during pursuit of the robbers,
had been shot by either George Curry or Kid Curry. Both outlaws were members of
Butch Cassidy's Wild Bunch, then known as The Hole-in-the-Wall Gang. Horn
passed this information on to detective Charlie Siringo, who was working the
case for the Pinkertons. So there was a semblance of
plausibility in the plot, even if Horn himself did not, as in the movie, track
down the Wild Bunch and kill Kid Curry.

Then it was directed by good old Lesley
Selander (right), a B-movie director, yes, but one who had learned his craft as assistant director under Fritz Lang, and who had loads of experience and a dash
of verve. Later, as the market for Westerns declined, he turned to TV shows but
he worked on very many feature-film oaters before that, starting in the 20s on
silent movies as assistant to the famous (or infamous) Lynn Reynolds and then directing a whole heap of
B-Westerns with the likes of Buck Jones and William Boyd (he did many of the
Hopalong Cassidy pictures). To this day, Selander remains one of the most prolific directors of feature Westerns in cinema history. He had directed Montgomery and Cameron in Belle Starr’s Daughter in 1948, so this
was something of a reunion.

Though I am not the world's greatest Rod Cameron
fan, I must say he is terrific in Dakota
Lil as Harve Logan aka Kid Curry. Brutal and tough, this Logan, crooked
saloon owner and thug, really comes across as a bad guy. He strangles poor old
Wallace Ford, a detective under cover, and discards the body as if it were
nothing. He quirts hero Horn (also undercover) while two of his henchmen hold
him. He is a thoroughly bad egg, and furthermore is heavily into counterfeiting,
often a theme of B-Westerns, particularly in the 1930s when undermining the
currency was indeed an especially grave offence. Cameron’s height and build add
to his menace. It’s an excellent performance.

The title’s lady is played by Marie
Windsor (right). Ms. Windsor was a stalwart of noir B-movies but she also had a very
good sideline in B-Westerns. She never made it to A-picture Hollywood stardom
but I think she was always good in oaters (especially, later, TV Westerns). She
usually played ‘the other woman’ or a rather racy saloon dame and her rep as a
gun moll from the thrillers helped. She was very beautiful in a 1940s way. The
year before Dakota Lil she had got
the female lead in a Bill Elliott oater and it seemed she was on the up. Look
out for her also in the underrated Little Big Horn the following year and she topped the billing in Outlaw Women the year after that. Her Dakota
Lil is definitely on the dubious side (as women with place names usually were,
like Dallas in Stagecoach, Colorado in Colorado Territory, Denver in Wagonmaster, Chihuahua in My Darling Clementine, Vienna in Johnny Guitar, Waco in The Silver Whip, and so on). She
is a glamorous saloon singer (her mimed songs were actually sung by Anita
Ellis) who is a very handy forger. The way she sees off the resident singer in
Harve’s saloon so she can take her place is just brilliant.

I also like her because not only does
she have a derringer, she draws it (from a very ladylike holster on her garter)
no fewer than four times! You know how I like derringers. Of course she’s a
classic derringer-user.

As for George Montgomery (left, with Windsor), well, I’m
afraid I’m not really a fan. But I will say that this was one of his better
roles. He makes of Horn almost a Lassiter-type man in black, even if his pants
are so high-waisted they seem to be belted under his armpits. He has Geronimo’s
knife in a harness strapped to his back. I think Montgomery was not as good as Cameron or, say, Calhoun and was perhaps one of the weaker Western stars but he did do a good number of oaters and was quite popular in the 1950s. Maybe you are a fan. But I don't think the Montgomery Fan Club is overpopulated, really.

The best actor, though, I thought, was
John Emery (right) as the poor sap who loves Dakota Lil despite all. A concert pianist from a
posh Philadephia family, he has sunk to playing the joanna in a seedy bar in
Matamoros. He knows he’s pathetic, and he also knows he will never win her, but
he can’t shake free. Emery gives the part just the right amount of self-pity
mixed with loyalty. It’s very well done. He often played dapper gentlemen or
posh types. He was at one time Mr. Tallulah Bankhead. He only did three Western
movies but he is very good in this one. You should see the glares he gives
would-be lovers of Lil. If looks could kill, they’d all be six foot
underground.

Of the rest of the cast, Wallace Ford is
good (he always was) as a gang member, secretly a cop, Jack Lambert, always a splendid heavy, does well
as a psycho gang member who favors dum-dum bullets, Walter Sande is a briefly
seen Butch Cassidy (there’s no Sundance) and you can spot Jack Perrin, Kenneth MacDonald
and J Farrell MacDonald in bit parts. Kid Curry is head of the gang, not Butch,
and he runs it like a military operation, having the bandits train for hours a
day in shooting, riding, escaping and so forth. Not very plausible, I know.

The music is by Dimitri Tiomkin, so
classy. It’s that kind of score tailored to the action, with, for example,
clashing chords at each knife thrust. The cinematography is by Jack Greenhalgh,
very much a B-Western expert but competent, and there are some nice California
and Nevada locations doing duty for Wyoming.

It was in color and would probably be
rather nice that way but sadly it’s usually watched these days in black &
white, which is the way I have seen it. Still, it’s slightly noirish in tone and has similarities
with a B gangster flick so the monochrome kinda suits it.

Well, the plot is foiled and Harve comes
to a, er, sticky end. Horn and Lil ride off into the sunset. Amiable tosh, I would
say.

Saturday, October 22, 2016

I learn a lot from my readers, and I much
enjoy it when they leave comments. Reader John Knight, commenting on my recent review
of a Rory Calhoun Western, Ride Out for Revenge, put me onto other good Calhoun Westerns, mentioning in particular “the weird and wacky anti-Feminist Western RAW EDGE.”

Actually, I’m not sure how anti-feminist the
movie is, as we shall shortly see. But John went on to say that Raw Edge “is
possibly the most anachronistic Western ever. Herbert Rudley turns 1840's
Oregon into a medieval fiefdom whereby any ‘unattached’ woman becomes the ‘property’
of the first man to claim her. With the likes of Neville Brand, Emile Meyer and
Robert Wilke slugging it out, no Western gal ever had it so bad.”

So that sets up the plot well.
John added that the “Film is too dumb to offend and at least the scenery is
nice - should look great on Blu-Ray. It’s an Albert Zugsmith production-you
have been warned.” So those were useful and interesting comments.

Well, I got the DVD (on the
French Sidonis brand, which has annoying subtitles that you can’t turn off and
some rather waffly and superficial commentary by Patrick Brion, but the picture quality is very good) and watched it.
And in many ways I see what John means. But read the following and watch the
movie yourself and see if you agree!

The writing of the curious plot
was by Harry Essex and Robert Hill from a story by William Kozlenko and James Benson
Nablo. These were not names I knew but Essex had worked on the screenplay of
three B-Westerns before Raw Edge and
would later contribute to The Sons of Katie Elder; as for Hill, Kozlenko and Nablo, this was their only Western. So
the writing team were pretty well newbies. But they had a quirky and
interesting story to work with.

As for John’s red flag on
producer Albert Zugsmith (right), he was known for such mighty epics as Sex Kittens Go to College, which
doubtless you have seen. Founding newspaper editor, sharp lawyer, band
publicist then Hollywood producer, he specialized in salacious B-movies. He only
produced five Westerns, all B, two of them with Calhoun.

DP Maury Gertsman shot 28
Westerns for Universal between 1947 and 1967, mostly what you might call
quality B-pictures with the likes of Jeff Chandler, Audie Murphy and Joel
McCrea in the leads. Universal did not stint on color or locations and many of
their 50s Westerns, including Raw Edge,
are visually attractive. The ‘Oregon’ of the setting was California but the
locations chosen did very well for Oregon. The Technicolor of the modern print
is bright and high-quality.

So you see we’re not talking
ultra-low-budget B-movies here.

It kicks off with a bad ballad
under the bright turquoise credits, as 50s Westerns were wont to do, but we forgive
the songwriter, Terry Gilkyson, because he also wrote Bare Necessities for The
Jungle Book, which may just possibly be the best song ever written in the history of music, eat your heart out, Schubert.

The top-billed names in the
credits don’t exactly fill you with confidence (apart from Calhoun): Yvonne De
Carlo and Mara Corday. Oh dear. But then your eye scans the ‘also starring’
list and joy, we see Neville Brand, Emile Meyer and Robert J Wilke, among other
old friends. Excellent. Always enjoyable Western character actors, those - especially
as bad guys. Rex Reason is also there, as a smooth gambler.

The patriarch Montgomery
(Herbert Rudley) who has established the disgusting local law that an unmarried
woman may be claimed as a chattel by the first man to see her, has a glam wife,
Hannah (De Carlo), first seen with a daring glimpse of ankle and leered over by
Neville. Emile is Neville’s dad and just as full of lust. (Actually Emile was
only ten years older than Neville but anyway). Hannah is discreetly raped in a
stable. Can you be discreetly raped? Well, you could in 50s movies, with much
done in shadows and much suggested. Odds are that it was Neville, Emile or Bob,
but we don’t see. Anyway, they blame young Dan Kirby (John Gavin, later Destry
on TV, later still Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to Mexico, as John Gilmore) and,
as was the way in Westerns, hastily hang him. Even while the lynching is
proceeding, the lustful men are leering at his soon-to-be widow, and Hannah
tries, unsuccessfully, to whisk her away to her people (for you might think it’s
Mara Corday in half a ton of make-up but she’s actually Paca, Indian maid). It’s
all pretty creepy. Probably the creepiest leerer, though, better even than
Neville Brand, is Robert J Wilke, who manages to claim her, though he has to
shoot a rival (sword-and-sandal star Ed Fury) to do it.

Bob Wilke. What a sneer.

As a result of these shenanigans
the Indians recall all their people to the village. You should see the horror
of Hannah, suddenly left without servants. Whatever will she do? She might have
to cook herself!

That’s when ex-Ranger Tex Kirby
arrives (he’d been fighting with Sam H at San Jacinto) and finds only the
hanging boots of his brother. Any viewer of Westerns knows that it’s going to
be hard times for the townsfolk that hanged him. Actually, though, Calhoun does
well as the thoughtful revenger.

Uh-oh

When patriarch Montgomery is
killed by the Indians, the boot is suddenly on the other foot, and Yvonne is
fair game under the Montgomerys’ own law. Hoist with her own petard, you might
say. Now the men (Neville and Emile to the fore) are after her. As reader John
said, a Western gal never had it so bad. You sense, though, that it will be
Rory to the rescue.

The town is named Twin Peaks,
which was to become quite amusing. Though we are in 1840s Oregon, they all wear
Stetsons (invented in the 1860s) and have Colt Peacemakers (1870s). But never
mind.

There’s plenty of action before
the bad guys get their come-uppance.

Yvonne 'n' Mara

My above-mentioned doubts about
the male chauvinism of the piece concern the fact that the law is so obviously
vile, and leads to such cruelty and bloodshed, and is finally vanquished, so
that the movie ends up being a pro-woman statement. Probably not Mr. Zugsmith’s
intention, but that’s the way I see it.

At any rate, John was right: it’s
a curious, oddball Western. And I think I am slowly revising (upwards) my
opinion of Rory Calhoun. He was a better Western actor than I have previously
given him credit for.

It was a huge hit when it came
out in 1912 and movie versions were inevitable. Only six years after
publication, Fox produced a big (five-reel) movie, starring William Farnum, Dustin’s
brother, as Lassiter. I haven’t seen it (I’d like to; so many important films are still so difficult to find).

That was followed by the Tom Mix one (he was Lassiter, of course) in 1925, when Mix was at the height of his
fame. I don’t know about the first one but the Mix version took very
considerable liberties with the story, devoting much of its only 56 minutes to
an invented backstory, all about how Millie was abducted in Texas. The picture
was quite sober, for Tom, but it wasn’t a good treatment of the novel.

The 1931 talkie was much truer
to the book, and I think in fact, considering all, it goes a fair way to doing
to justice to the novel.

The story does make a
good movie. Long novels have to be radically slimmed down for the screen but
luckily Riders had pages and pages of
soppy love and descriptions of nature that could be immediately discarded, and
the novel’s action, which is genuinely good, would remain for the film.

You probably know the
story. In fact, though, there are two parallel stories (though unlike parallel
lines, they occasionally intersect): everyone thinks of Riders as the tale of the mysterious gun-man in black, Lassiter,
who comes into the life of beautiful cattle rancher Jane Withersteen, champions
her cause and steals her heart. But in fact a greater part of the book is
devoted to the other story – how Jane’s rider (or cowboy) Bern Venters shoots
the famous ‘masked rider’, sidekick of rustler Oldring, and discovers he has
shot a girl. He nurses her back to health in a hidden cañon, falls in love with
her and they eventually live happily ever after.

The 1931 film, in
common with other versions, plays down Venters and elevates Lassiter. The
famous horse chase when Venters on Wrangle rides down jockey Jerry Carn leaping
at full gallop between the blacks Night and Black Star as they hurtle
across the sage is one of the genuinely thrilling parts of the book, but in the
movie it’s Lassiter who does the gallopin’. And Bern Venters has, for some
reason, become Vern Venters (James Todd, billed only fifth).

Today’s print (or at
least the one I saw) is unfortunately very crackly and washed out, and it jumps
a great deal, making you miss key moments of dialogue. It’s a pity. Still, you
can see well enough to appreciate some of the cinematography (George
Schneiderman, with Ernest Palmer, the most prolific
cinematographer at Fox in the 1920's; he worked a lot on early John Ford Westerns).
Yes, there are some obvious studio shots with cardboard rocks but there is also
some nice location shooting filmed round Sedona and some unusual pans and
moving-camera shots (movies were just breaking away from the very static
camera). Director Hamilton MacFadden also handled the exterior action shots
well, especially the horse chase, which includes a spectacular leap. MacFadden
was signed as director by Fox in 1930 but in 1934 his contract not renewed
after the merger with Zanuck's 20th Century Productions, after which he
appeared as an actor in small film roles until the mid-40's. While at Fox he
only directed two Westerns, this one and a Tom Mix oater. A pity: he seemed to
have the knack.

George O’Brien is
actually quite impressive as Lassiter. His entry especially is good (but then
it’s a gift scene in the book). He talks more slowly than the other characters
and this gives weight. Navy boxing champion in World War I, he was, as a
virtual unknown, picked by John Ford to star in The Iron Horse in 1924. In ’26 he was one of Ford’s 3 Bad Men, in the silent version. He
made the transition to sound, but not that well and his parts started to
decline in stardom, and he became a Western specialist, at a time when many Westerns
were pretty juvenile and low-budget affairs. All in all, though, he does a
fairly good job in Purple Sage.

His Jane is Marguerite
Churchill. Ms. Churchill had been strikingly good opposite a young John Wayne, I thought,
in Fox’s Raoul Walsh-directed epic The Big Trail the year before. She only did these two Westerns, though. Two
years after Purple Sage she would
become Mrs. George O’Brien. As Jane she was not, I thought, as good as she was
in The Big Trail, falling into
overacting in a rather silent-movie style.

The bad guy Dyer is
Noah Beery (Sr., obviously). In common with the other versions, he is Judge
Dyer, not a bishop. The whole Mormon plot is again done away with. Grey was
uncompromising in his anti-Mormonism. The Mormons are very clearly the bad
guys. Under the hypocritical cover of their religion, they steal, spy, covet,
lust, kidnap and kill. Sometimes all on the same day. The Elder Tull and the
Bishop Dyer, in particular, are very nasty and, in the best Western tradition,
deserve the come-uppance that they will inevitably get under the guns of
the good guys.

Movie versions of the
book were mealy-mouthed about this and excised the Mormon element of the story.
The O’Brien one is no exception. Perhaps Fox didn’t want to offend potential
audiences, or perhaps the studio bosses were more pro-Mormon, I don’t know.
Maybe it was just 30s PCism. Anyway, Dyer is a judge and Elder Tull becomes
just the judge’s henchman, Tull (Frank McGlynn Jr.) Beery is excellent, as he always
was. Though he never achieved the fame of his younger brother Wallace, he
carved out a niche for himself as a Hollywood heavy, especially in Westerns –
he appeared in fifty, from 1917 to 1945. Impressive. His bulk and growly voice
were (once talkies came along) great assets, and he is a suitably villainous
judge. He wants to take over the whole valley and drive the small ranchers out,
you know how villains do.

His demise is quite
well handled. In the Tom Mix version the judge hides behind his desk and so we
don’t see him shot, only the sinister tell-tale bullet holes in the wood. But
the 1931 one had more gunplay as the judge pulls a pistol but Lassiter has a
faster draw and a better aim.

Don’t get me wrong:
this Purple Sage is no great film. It’s
a one-hour programmer with no great pretensions. But it manages to telescope
the main action of the book into the hour quite well, and there are sufficient
qualities in the movie to warrant your having a look at it.

It was remade in 1941
(with the rather weak George Montgomery as Lassiter) and there was a TV movie
with Ed Harris in 1996. I think it could be time for another.

Tuesday, October 18, 2016

There is a genre of movie comedies which
relies on the gag of lots of old-timers getting back together, with much humorous
bickering and badinage, comically demonstrating their frailties and
unsuitability for a tough task, then showing up the youthful pretenders: when
the going gets tough, the oldies get going, that kind of thing. Space Cowboys was a recent example. These
pictures appeal to an old-fogey audience that has fond memories of the movies
of older (or former) stars and wallows in nostalgia as they return to the
screen. In Western vein, such a picture was The Over the Hill Gang (1969) and its sequel the following year. And in fact Once Upon a Texas Train is a remake of
that geriatric outing. Yes, TV movies are now remaking TV movies.

The good news is that it was produced,
written and directed by Burt Kennedy (left). Now it is true that Mr. Kennedy was
responsible for a couple of less-than-wonderful Westerns (such as The Canadians or Return of the Magnificent Seven) but he deserves eternal praise for
penning those Randolph Scott/Budd Boetticher B-Westerns at the end of the 50s,
which were outstanding. I also liked his Clint Walker ones, Fort DobbsandYellowstone Kelly. He did have a particular penchant for the comic,
and he handled comedy Westerns well. That’s not always easy to do but Kennedy
managed to convey a fondness and respect for the genre which not all parodies
did. Personally, I love his Support Your Localmovies with James Garner, and I also think The Rounders charming and enjoyable. All in all, I’m a bit of a
Kennedy fan.

Well, there are two groups of oldies,
roughly segregated into good guys and bad guys but they are all pals deep down and
we sense they will end the movie shoulder to shoulder, which they duly do.
Governor (presumably Texas governor) Kevin McCarthy instructs retired Texas
Ranger captain Richard Widmark (right) to get his men together and round up the outlaw Willie
Nelson and his gang. Willie has just been released after twenty years in the
pen for a failed train robbery (which we see in the opening scene) and six
hours later dynamites a bank. Widmark is cross because he got Willie released
on parole in the first place and this is how he is repaid!

So he sends a coded telegram, Brazos, to
his former Rangers and we are introduced to these one by one: Sergeant Chuck
Connors is seen in an old folks home vainly trying to teach Hank Worden (left), oddly
billed as Hank Warden, to draw on a man. There’s a subtle in-joke about Hank’s
rocking chair. Gentleman George Asque is a roguish, bearded and portly Stuart
Whitman, playing with gusto. The scout is portly (well, pointless to repeat;
they are all portly) Jack Elam, equally bearded, but he has no horse and uses a
bicycle, and his vision would be scorned as inadequate by any passing bat. He
does get to do the old Indian joke, though, with his ear to the ground. His long-suffering
brother is Harry Carey Jr. but he doesn't go on the mission. I guess he's not an ex-Ranger.

On the other side, Willie’s gang
includes Dub Taylor, getaway driver (who crashes the wagon), gunman Gene Evans
(who grabs the wrong end of his Winchester), gambler Ken Curtis (who has almost
nothing to say; he was near the end of his life and I wonder if he was well),
and nitro ‘expert’ Royal Dano (as amusingly lugubrious as ever).

They were obviously having fun

Oh, and the dame the leaders of both parties
love is Angie Dickinson.

So you see the names are there alright.
Some of the great Western character actors.

Willie Nelson. Yes, well.

Willie got top billing. Unfortunately,
as we know, as an actor Willie makes a great singer. Still, there he is, in his
long hair and with his gravelly voice. He leads the singing in one scene. Actually,
Willie is an even worse dancer than he is an actor. There’s a flashback scene
of a ball when he and Dick in Confederate officers’ uniforms are dancing with
Angie. Dick is no better, mind.

They both lover her. Whom will she choose?

There are some good Burt Kennedy lines.
I liked

-Outlawin’ ain’t what it used to
be.

-It never was.

And while their first reaction is to
mock the geriatric gunfighters, one of the young-punk outlaws reminds the
others that “those old men got that way by stayin’ alive.”

Yes, there are four young-punk outlaws
who try to take Willie’s gold away and keep it for themselves. This is naughty;
outlaws are supposed to rob their own banks, apparently. I hadn’t heard of any
of these outlaws (Shaun Cassidy, Jeb Stuart Adams, David Michael O’Neill and
John Calkins; doubtless they will be known to younger viewers) but they are OK,
I guess. They aren’t very good outlaws, though, and come the final showdown
they look a bit scared. Well, by then Chuck’s Rangers and Willie’s outlaws have
united so there are nine aged but experienced gunmen with an arsenal of rifles,
a shotgun and several .45s to walk down on but four callow youths. No wonder
they were scared. But they needn’t have worried too much: it’s a family movie
and so they are only wounded at the end.

The train of the title is a one-car
affair but still, it’s a train. Where earlier Westerns used trains with
abandon, even crashing them (Denver & Rio Grande even crashed two, in a head on collision) Western trains became increasingly
rare, and costly, and so it’s nice to see one in a TV movie.

It’s all very Arizona for Texas, being
shot round Old Tucson with loads of saguaros, and some scenes in California and
Nevada. Never mind. It’s ‘Western’.

Well, it’s all harmless fun. Who gets
Angie in the end? Ah, that would be telling.